“Values stronger than steel”, the slogan of Tata Steel, shows the distinctiveness of the Tata group, India’s largest private conglomerate. Its founder Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (Jamsetji) promoted its values of trust, dependability and social responsibility. Everybody in India knows the story: how one family established an empire now involved in nearly every aspect of life: computing, chemicals, energy, cars, food processing, cosmetics. The group’s products are ubiquitous and Tata remains linked to the building of the nation: their development and economic fortunes have been intertwined since the late 19th century.

Jamsetji left the family’s import-export business, which was involved in the opium trade with China. to go into textiles in 1868. Later he established the company — now Tata Sons Limited, the group’s main holding company — in partnership with his elder son Dorabji and his cousin Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata. Jamsetji, who had links with the Congress Party (founded in 1884), in which Gandhi would become the leading figure, always believed in independence. He believed that economic power was a prerequisite of political freedom and so pioneered development in steel, energy and scientific research. His vision of modernisation was such that prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru later referred to Jamsetji as a “single-handed planning commission” (the institution that formulated India’s Five Year Plans). But Jamsetji’s plans only came to fruition after his death in 1904.

He created his first businesses, in steel, energy, cement, oil, insurance, chemicals, aeronautics and car manufacturing, under British rule. In 1911 he founded the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, a city that now epitomises modernity, particularly in IT and computer services. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was opened in Mumbai in 1944, and later became the Atomic Research Institute. Major names in Indian science and industry, including C V Raman, Nobel laureate in physics in 1930, (...)